Retirement Benefits - Social Security: Fill & Download for Free

TL; DR: Social Security offers overseas direct deposit for beneficiaries. There is no need to travel to the US to apply for or pick up benefits.More information can be found by reading the SSA booklet on payments outside the US, found here: https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10137.pdf (https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10137.pdf)However, if you're one of the many Indian citizens working in the US on H-1B, you may wish to read further for additional information and my answer may dispel many myths you may have heard about foreign workers and Social Security retirement benefits.Provided one is fully qualified by having 40 quarters of coverage (generally 10 years of work), they can draw a retirement benefit. In the past, foreign workers who chose not to pursue LPR status didn’t remain in the US long enough to earn 40 SSA work quarters. However, with the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act, this has changed, primarily for India-born workers who cannot get LPR status in a timely manner because of the diversity cap in Sec 202(a)(2) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Those workers with an approved I-140 petition can remain in H-1B status indefinitely. These same workers are going to be the ones who are most likely to work long enough to qualify for a retirement benefit while at the same time not being LPRs or citizens of the US.How does the quarter of coverage system work? Below is a table showing the amount of Social Security taxable income that one must earn in a given year to get one quarter of coverage:A maximum of four quarters can be earned in a given year. For 2020, once one has earned $5,640, they have earned their four quarters for the year. For a person earning six figures, they’ll earn this by the end of January. The amount a quarter is worth may not seem like much, but when one looks at a person earning the federal minimum wage working 40 hours per week, it will take them five months (20 weeks) of full time work to earn four quarters. The best way to determine SSA taxed earnings is by looking at one’s W-2:Box 3 will show the wages that were taxed for Social Security. So long as this amount is over the value for four work quarters, one has earned all their quarters for that year.The tax deduction on one’s paycheck can have many names. It can be ‘Social Security’, however other acronyms used are OASDI, FICA (the law that mandates payroll taxes for Social Security contributions and Medicare) and SSDI (which refers to the disability benefit only.) Depending on how an employer chooses to list deductions, they may be broken out into the 6.2% Social Security amount and the 1.45% Medicare amount or they may be lumped together at 7.65% of income subject to these taxes. Both the employer and the employee contribute an equal amount. Self employed persons who are sole proprietors (Schedule C) will pay both portions or 15.3%; this is commonly called the self-employment tax, but it is the same tax employees pay, just twice as much to account for the fact the the self employed person is also their own employer.Do not confuse Social Security retirement and disability benefits with the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which is also administered by the Social Security Administration. It is a separate welfare program for US citizens and certain LPRs. It cannot be paid to beneficiaries who live outside the US. SSI is means tested and for the disabled and elderly who are very poor and have no or little other income and resources of their own.Another confusion is company retirement plans like 401(k)s. These plans are private. Every plan is different and rules vary. Normally contributions to these plans are refunded to the contributor if they have not become vested by contributing for the required minimum period of time. If one is forced to cash out a 401(k), they need to see a financial planner or accountant if they are not aware of the pitfalls of cashing out a 401(k) before one is 59 1/2 and/or taking the money out all at one. Read one’s 401(k) literature carefully.Edit: There is a lot of disinformation out there. If one wants to comment that my answer is incorrect or a reply to a comment is incorrect, they must post links to original research, not links to discussion groups or hearsay anecdotal evidence, news articles, etc. I will not allow the comments to this answer to be used to spread disinformation.I am open to learning new information or a correction from what my own original research has found, but such information must be substantiated. Any contrary comments without valid citations will be deleted. You have been warned - my answer, my rules.Currently, according to the Social Security Administration, there is exists no treaty, or totalization agreement, between the US and India regarding social security benefits or contributions. U.S. International Social Security AgreementsA person must contribute to Social Security and earn 40 work quarters (10 years) to be insured for a retirement benefit. Generally, H-1B status can last a maximum of six years. However, the AC-21 Act allows H-1B status to be extended indefinitely, thus it is possible for certain H-1B workers to meet the 40 quarter requirement. AC21 generally benefits those foreign workers with an approved I-140 petition but who cannot apply permanent residence yet due to the artificial backlog created by INA Sec. 202(a)(2). Those affected are mostly India-born.Please do not contribute to the disinformation that already exists. Do original research on the law for yourself, do not rely on the Internet or even my own answer. Every person’s case is unique; what applies to one may not apply to all.Edit #2: Please do not confuse the Supplemental Security Income program (SSI) with Social Security retirement benefits, referred to by many acronyms such as SSDI and OASDI. FICA is the law that mandates payroll deduction of the taxes for OASDI and Medicare. These are separate programs. SSI is a welfare benefit available only to US citizens and in limited circumstances, LPRs. SSI is means tested and is designed for those with no income or resources who cannot work for medical reasons or have reached retirement age. This is not the program I'm talking about.Edit #3: Moved some information in the prior edits into the main answer and reorganized the answer for easier reading. 25K plus views! I hope all those who have read are much better informed about Social Security than they were.Edit #4: Added information about how SSA work quarters are earned. This answer is getting really long, however I’m adding information based on questions raised in the comments. I’ve also done more revising and reorganization to shorten the answer.Edit #5: Added information that 401(k) plans and other company offered retirement savings plans are private and have nothing to do with Social Security.

This one is so easy, and it baffles me that the media won’t correct the confusing words that are used to describe the problem at hand.The primary job of Congress is to fund the government. That’s it. Just pass a budget, and don’t screw up the economy. The government buys things, and they bring money in, and they borrow money when they don’t have enough money to pay for what they’re buying. Presumably, when they have to borrow money, they’re smart enough to raise more money to pay back what they are borrowing.That paragraph above is the whole picture. Really, it’s the primary job that those representatives we elect have to do.How does the government raise money? Well, these days, it’s primarily by taxes on you and me as citizens. How do they borrow money? A key component of borrowing is the issuing of bonds (think of them like an IOU) that are purchased on the open market. Like all bonds, these carry an interest rate. So essentially the government takes out a loan in the form of a bond that it promises to repay. For this discussion, another component of borrowing over the past few decades has been to borrow money from the Trust Funds (Social Security is a Trust Fund.) Those Trust Funds are set up so that they can loan money to the Federal government when they have a surplus.The Trust Funds (like Social Security) are not part of that budget that Congress needs to manage. Those trust funds are set up intentionally to be beyond the greedy little fingers of corrupt managers. They have income clearly defined, and they have expenses clearly defined. They are solvent. However, as our country’s population ages, there will come a time (in a matter of many years) when the income to those trust funds will need to be raised to account for the aging population. Right now, folks with higher incomes actually pay less (as a percent of their total income) in Social Security tax than folks with average or lower income. The tax is set up so you have to pay no matter how little you make, but at a certain point (right now a little over $100k/year) you get to stop paying the tax. This means that the more you earn, the lower your Social Security tax is.Any worries about the future point (remember many years away) when the fund would need to raise taxes could be ERASED IMMEDIATELY if Congress would simply say that everyone has to pay the same Social Security tax rate by eliminating the cap on the tax. Of course, everyone in Congress makes more than the cap, so of course, they won’t take this step. But remember, this is not complicated at all. This single step of eliminating the cap would fix any future concern for as far as the eye can see.So the last couple of paragraphs have talked about how to assure that the current Social Security trust fund remains solvent in the future. IT IS SOLVENT NOW, and will remain so for many years. But to fix any future issues, there is a very simple fix that Congress could implement tomorrow. Why don’t they?Now let’s talk about the federal budget. Remember that Social Security has nothing to do with that federal budget, other than the fact that the federal government has been borrowing from that trust fund for years. Lately, the government has not been able to borrow from that fund. In fact, the government has amassed quite a debt to the Social Security trust fund as they borrowed for years from it.You might ask, “Why was the government borrowing all this money from the trust fund? Why didn’t they just leave it alone?” For the past few decades, since the 1980’s, it has become very popular for elected officials to achieve that “elected” status by promising to cut taxes, even when the budget didn’t allow them to cut taxes. Sure they could have reduced spending, but they didn’t. They increased spending, and they cut taxes anyway.So they had to borrow money.And now they are being asked to repay the money that they borrowed. It’s that simple. Our elected officials cut taxes without paying for those tax cuts with spending cuts. One of the credit cards they used to help fund those tax cuts was borrowing from the Social Security trust fund. They have reached their credit limit on that credit card, and the bank is asking them to repay the money they promised they would repay.It is really that doggone simple.But Mr. McConnell and other weasels up in Washington want you to think that it’s more complex than that. They want you to think that Social Security has a problem. The problem is that Mr. McConnell’s creditor is asking him to pay back the money he borrowed, and Mr. McConnell is trying to weasel his way out of his debt by making it sound like the creditor has a problem.Granted, the weasels like McConnell have been committing this irresponsible management on behalf of us, the American people. We elected them after all. And I do agree that we are accountable for whom we elect. It is my fervent hope that we are getting smarter, and results of tomorrow’s election will indicate whether we are continuing to elect lying cheats like McConnell or whether we’re finally starting to turn the tide and send people to Washington who will behave with just a tiny little shred of honesty and decency. We’ll see.As to the current situation, the federal budget answer is pretty easy. Mr. McConnell and our elected officials need to raise taxes in order to pay the bills that they have incurred. It’s that simple. They know it, but they won’t say it. Why won’t they say it? Because they just passed this massive tax giveaway debacle earlier this year, which compounded the problem even more. THIS IS WHY THEY ARE IN CRISIS—THEY CUT THEIR OWN FUNDING. This is why they can’t pay their bills.Why is it that the media doesn’t expose their lies every time they utter them? Why doesn’t the media correct them every time they tell this lie, and ask why they are confusing the solvency of the trust fund with the federal deficit. They are two separate things. They are only intertwined to the extent that the federal government needs to repay the billions that they have borrowed from the trust funds. They borrowed that money to help pay for tax cuts. Now it’s time to repay the money. How they gonna do it?Well, Mitchy boy, how ya gonna do it?EDIT on 7November:Lots of folks get hung up on my comments above that if Mitch wanted to solve his crisis he could do it tomorrow by eliminating the earnings cap. This misses the point. The point is that there is no crisis that involves Social Security (etc). We have a budget crisis, and that budget crisis has been caused and exacerbated by the misguided GOP tax cuts that primarily benefited the wealthy.That is the crisis, and Mitch needs to own that. He is lying to folks by trying to make Social Security the bad guy, but Social Security is just fine. Mitch just needs to pay his bills.Which is where the problem comes in: One of his bills is repayment of the loans that Congress has been taking from the Social Security Trust Fund while the Fund had a big surplus. Congress borrowed the money with the promise to repay, and Mitch wants us to think that he shouldn’t have to repay. He’s doing this because he doesn’t want us to see what a colossally bad job Congress has been doing of their one big job — manage the budget.At some point Social Security revenue and benefits need to be tuned, just as we have tuned them in the past. We can do that now, but there is no hurry. Right now the crisis is that Congress has dramatically cut funding to the government (again) by cutting taxes on the wealthy (again) and Mitchy and that crowd need to fix that problem.Steven Pritikin offered a wonderful comment that does a great deal to clarify, and with his permission I include that below:I would advise anyone interested in this discussion to read ‘The Truth About Social Security: The Founders’ Words Refute Revisionist History, Zombie Lies, and Common Misunderstandings’ by Nancy Altman. Social security is an insurance policy meant to replace lost wages due to retirement or disability. It lends money to the gov’t through its buying of treasury bonds with surplus funds in any fiscal year. It does this because it is the safest investment that can be made (as long as we don’t alow the US treasury to default). If the treasury didn’t sell bonds to the SSA then it would have to sell them elsewhere to keep the government operating. There is no way around repaying these debts whether to ourselves or to other entities without a total collapse of our financial system.That a collapse becomes more likely every year is not the fault of Social Security but that of greedy idiots sucking off the public tit with giant tax breaks and unchecked spending. As for the argument that since we are living longer, and the trust fund will be depleted sooner, legislative changes to the Trust fund have been recently made raising the full retirement age from 65 to 66 and then to 67. With what is going on with the environment and our health care our national life expectancy has dropped to 31st among other nations. While the current administration likes to ignore science as well as economics, acturaries work for SSA as well as all other insurance companies and can tell well ahead of time when changes need to be made to secure the trust fund.

You are on social security disability and at age 61 you have been on it for 4 years. Full retirement age for you is about age 67. As a disability beneficiary, you are receiving the equivalent of a full retirement benefit. If you remain on disability to your full retirement age, your benefits will continue coming at the same rate including all the cost of living increases received during the interim. A bookkeeping change occurs behind the scenes so that the origins of your benefits are changed from the Disability Trust Fund to the Retirement Trust Fund.Can you lose your disability benefits at your age? It is theoretically possible, depending on a number of factors. All disability beneficiaries must undergo a continuing disability review periodically. This review process has varying periods of time intervals that depends on the likelihood of medical improvement in your case. You may have already undergone one, or are undergoing one now.In my career, I performed an initial screening of over 10,000 of these disability review cases. Things may have changed a lot in the ensuing 9 years. Back then if we found a case marked as “Medical Improvement Not Expected” and the disability found was appropriate for that category, the review was completed and a continuance decision was processed. That screening also processed continuances on cases that would attain age 65 within a year of the screening. With the current Administration’s attempts to remove more beneficiaries sooner that usual, these guidelines may very well change.So if you are contacted by SSA to undergo a continuing disability review, respond promptly and completely. There were significant backlogs of these cases when I retired, at all levels of the process. I saw cases returned as continuances 2 years after the paperwork was filed because the beneficiary had attained age 65 in the interim.With the Administration simultaneously increasing the workloads and decreasing the budget to accomplish those workloads, I expect backlogs to mushroom.